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I didn’t get to see The Witcher 3 at E3 this year, but Darryn – whose experience with the franchise is a limited to staring at pictures of digital boobs – did. He just could not shut up about the game afterwards; it even winning our completely meaningless Best of E3 award. As the WRPG guy, I made damned sure that I’d see it at Gamescom. And I’m glad I did. Because eyeballgasms.

I’m currently a bit of an oddity in the gaming world as I’m a huge first person shooter fan and yet I simply can’t get into Battlefield 3. I’ve tried it on both consoles and the PC and the PC version is by far the most engaging; yet it’s still not what I’d call fun.

Ask any self-proclaimed hardcore gamer, and they will tell you two things about Nintendo; the company makes games for kids, and its decidedly last-generation systems are selling so badly that its sending Nintendo to the poorhouse.

The Mario and Luigi RPG series was borne from the ideal to bring Paper Mario, itself a throwover from the ideals of Super NES’s Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, to Nintendo’s handhelds. Progressive and delightfully daring, the series makes its debut on the 3DS with Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. After the frankly fantastic Bower’s Inside Story on the DS, developer AlphaDreamhas a lot to live up to with this sequel.

Another year, another Assassin’s Creed. But instead of an expansion, we’re getting a proper sequel in the core franchise. And it just may be the Assassin’s Creed game that would have been worth waiting an extra year for.

Look at you. You want to be a pro gamer, but your reaction speed is slower than a snail that has just puffed away the fattest spliff possible. Your current Xbox 360 controller is holding you back man! You need something better, faster and more in line with your ambitions!

So the cat is out of the bag, and now everyone knows that I wasn’t just cycling around Venice Beach trying to find Tenacious D last week. Call of Duty Ghosts is aiming to step things up a notch for the franchise later this year, and while baysplosions and 60 frames per second are par for the course as with any COD title. There is something else that’s new as well. Military trained killer attack German Shepard dogs. And their cute dog goggles. Or doggles. Ha!

It’s a hot day in Los Angeles, and it’s even hotter in the massive bus that we’ve all been bundled into, as we make our way to go grab an exclusive peek at the upcoming Call of Duty Ghosts, as well as two other Activision games that we can’t mention just yet. It’s a new era for gaming, and with Call of Duty having influenced the current-gen for better or for worse, a new start for that franchise as well.

Marketing a game is pretty easy these days. A mysterious package here, a bribe over there and a few teaser trailers thrown in for good measure and BAM! Job done, time to hit the bar. The thing is, gaming adverts these days are missing a certain something, a particular ingredient that has been lost over the years. I’m talking about downright tripping the light fantastic madness. Here’s ten adverts from yesteryear that downed a bottle of absinthe and then had some crystal meth for breakfast.

Can you believe it’s been a full 5 years since the original GRiD was released way back in 2008 and now to commemorate the end of the current generation of consoles Codemasters are releasing the much anticipated sequel to the game, GRiD 2.

There’s no denying that those extras for Call of Duty Black Ops 2 are a tad pricy. A season pass is going to cost you a pretty penny, so it better be worth it. Revolution was the first map pack released for the game, but it wasn’t exactly the best example of DLC, appealing to hardcore fans only in the long run. Uprising follows in those footsteps with an approach that only hits some of the necessary targets.

Our final interview at the Call of Duty Championship last week was with none other than the MLG co-founder himself, Mike Sepso. Starting from humble beginnings, the MLG has evolved over the years, yet Sepso remained down to earth, eager to talk about the future of esports as an entity and the direction that it was heading in.

Nintendo, it can be reasonably argued, has become a little stagnant and predictable with its first party games; hedging its bets on a handful of successful franchises like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Pokémon and of course, a barrage of Mario games. In the past few years, we’ve seen so much of the moustachioed plumber that even I’ve grown tired of him.